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2 results

  • 10 - Sound

  • from Part II - Forms of the Poem
  • Edited by Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Poem
    Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024, pp 165-177

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the aesthetic and imaginative significance of sound play, taking for its case study the poems of George Oppen. The chapter proposes that poetic sound play offers poets a way to explore value, whether it be a single vowel's sound value, a poet's preoccupation with certain subject matters, or that poet's particular political commitments. Through close readings of poems from across Oppen's career, and especially of Oppen's assonance and alliteration, the chapter argues that sound play becomes a social allegory, registering political possibilities which, on occasion, go beyond the poems’ explicit representations of social life. The chapter also shows how, as each sonic value is born afresh in each new usage, this sound play extends beyond the single poem to multiple poems. In the case of Oppen, sound play's continual production of the new through recombination promises, even as it cannot achieve, a future beyond capitalist reproduction.

  • Chapter 36 - San Francisco and the Beats

  • from Part IV - Beyond Modernism: American Poetry, 1950–2000
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 823-843

  • Summary

    Over the course of the depression that followed the stock market crash of October 1929, American poets on the left wrote an enormous amount of often passionate poetry addressing their social contexts. Revolutionary American poetry of the 1930s was inevitably written in the atmosphere of the modernist formal revolution. The Objectivists are thorough-going modernists, looking forward in both aesthetic and political terms. Carl Rakosi is an unabashedly lyrical poet, but with a propensity toward satire that often aims at social targets. As a movement and as individual poets, the Objectivists had been largely forgotten by the end of the 1930s. George Oppen and Rakosi had ceased writing, and Charles Reznikof had to some extent forgone poetry for prose writing. One index of the shift in Louis Zukofsky's concerns is the second half of A-9, written a decade after the first.